There is a wonderful video called “Design Is“, and it defines design as both a compulsion to give form to ideas and changing ‘what is’ to ‘what ought to be.’ This is the nature of Anna’s work. A compulsion to give form to what is. Changing what is to what ought to be.
Anna began her practice around the fall of 2009, when a pesky need to pay for books and rent in college made her seek out design clients and to put to use her previously “just for fun” art degree. (Her “real” degree was in marketing, with ambitions to study consumer behavior modeling, but Anna found that she functioned best when sleep deprived after long nights spent catching up on art assignments after a full day of business school and leadership extracurriculars. It was a wild time.)
Since then, Anna has worked on startup logos, social enterprise logos, consultancy logos, research lab logos, brand strategy, logo makeovers for midsize companies, brand style guides, color palette definition and refinement, imagery strategy, UX design for consumer apps, UX design for enterprise SaaS, WordPress sites (lots and lots of WordPress sites, doing everything from strategy to design to development to maintenance), Drupal sites, static HTML sites, data visualization (static and using tools like Highcharts and D3), Squarespace sites, web apps (let’s just lump in PHP, HTML, CSS, and JS here), illustration (standalone and for use in animation), magazine design, annual report design, marketing and advertising campaign and collateral design, design for retail store interiors and exteriors, lighting design and management for theater productions, messaging strategy, and even translating a bunch of old paleontology papers from her native Russian to English for The Smithsonian.*